Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (16 page)

As we have a period of seventy days, the prescribed time for the funerary arrangements to have been completed, for Ay to have been appointed as the next pharaoh, then Ankhesenpaaten must have written to the Hittite king almost immediately. Perhaps by the time the prince was sent, Ay had seized the throne and ordered the assassination. However, this would seem unlikely. Firstly, Ay was an old man who had been loyal to Akhenaten's family for years. It seems unthinkable that he would have turned against Akhenaten's daughter. Secondly, he had been Tutankhamun's right-hand man, virtually running the county, and so would almost certainly have been aware of a visit from the Hittite delegation to investigate the queen's story. The fact that they returned happy that everything was in order would suggest that it was Ay himself who had sanctioned the arrangement. The decision to make himself king, therefore,
would seemingly have been made after the Hittite prince had been murdered. If this was the true scenario then it shows that by this time, to have been desperate enough to try to forge an alliance with the Hittites, the Atenist faction was living in fear of a
coup d'état.
Ay only lived for a further four years and when he died the general Horemheb seized power. His authority having grown steadily for a decade, it is far more likely that it was on Horemheb's orders that the young prince was killed. Judging by his conduct when he became king, it was Horemheb that Ankhesenpaaten feared. The only other possibility to account for the Zannanza murder is that it was part of a clever scheme to occupy Horemheb and the army. Perhaps Ay set the whole thing up to provoke a war to keep Horemheb out of the way fighting the Hittites in the Asiatic provinces. This was certainly the outcome of the affair, which left Ay free to rule Egypt for another four years.

Apart from the return to Memphis and the re-establishment of the old religion, few events in Tutankhamun's reign have been found documented. The military situation is fairly clear from foreign sources, however. During the nine years of Tutankhamun's rule, the imperial army had been rejuvenated. It had apparently been restructured and enlarged and dispatched to restore control over the territories that Egypt still retained. A painting in the tomb of the viceroy Huy shows that raids were mounted in his province of Nubia, while Palestine and Syria probably suffered similar incursions from the northern army. Two scenes from a brightly painted gesso box from Tutankhamun's tomb shows the young king personally leading his troops, but this would seem unlikely for someone so young, and scenes from Horemheb's own tomb in Saqqara show
him
as commander-in-chief of the northern army.

By the time Ay died Horemheb had further established his
credentials for power with a series of victories over the Hittites, and, as the old king died without an heir, Horemheb was able to seize the throne for himself. To legitimate his claim he married Nefertiti's sister, Mutnodjme, and we hear no more of Ankhesenpaaten. The last of Akhenaten's daughters, it seems, was dead.

Horemheb's background is virtually unknown, except that he came from Heracleopolis, about half way between Heliopolis and Amarna, in Middle Egypt, and was obviously a career officer whose abilities were recognized early. Immediately on becoming pharaoh, he allied himself with the cult of Amun-Re, outlawed Atenism and re-established the Amun priesthood, appointing as priests loyal officers from his army. This was no nominal reversion to the old ways, as had been the policy of Ay, but a complete revival of the old gods. Whatever unique set of circumstances had brought about the rise of Atenism and led every element in the country to play along, if not actually embrace it, was now three decades in the past. Horemheb wanted to eradicate all evidence of Atenism and all those who had sanctioned it. Throughout the country, images of the Aten were defaced, Amarna was ransacked, and the temple of the Aten in Karnak was taken apart brick by brick. Although there is no textual reference to it, we can assume that the populace were subjected to a similar purge and thousands must have been persecuted and killed.

The Amarna kings became non-persons: the names of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay were struck off all monuments, save a few that were overlooked or out of the way. Horemheb even erased their names from the list of kings, beginning his own reign at the end of the reign of Amonhotep III. Consequently, none of them appeared in the king lists at Abydos and Karnak. Within a generation or two, the general
population seem unaware that the Amarna kings ever existed: just half a century later, in the tomb of a certain Amenmosi at Thebes, for example, a number of New Kingdom pharaohs are depicted in their order of succession. Here, Horemheb is placed between Amonhotep III and his successor Ramesses I, as if the owner had never heard of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay.

The wrath vented against Ay's monuments knew no bounds. Statues in his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, near Thebes, were defaced and his tomb in the Valley of the Kings was ransacked. Ay's tomb was found by Giovanni Belzoni (working for the British Museum) as early as 1816, but it was not until 1972 that a proper excavation took place. Not only was the sarcophagus found to have been smashed in antiquity, but Ay's figure was hacked out of wall paintings and his name excised from texts; there was even evidence that the mummy had been torn to sheds. This act of furious desecration was judged to have occurred during the reign of Horemheb and was almost certainly carried out on his orders. The same fate probably befell the mummies of Akhenaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Nefertiti, Meritaten and many more. The fascinating question, however, is how Tutankhamun's tomb managed to escape the carnage. It is, perhaps, understandable that Horemheb left Smenkhkare as he was, his remains desecrated and unnamed, but for Tutankhamun – a king whose statues he was toppling all over Egypt – to have been left alone surrounded by his fabulous treasures and kilogram upon kilogram of gold, is bewildering.

There can be little doubt that Horemheb knew exactly were Tutankhamun's tomb was situated. The reliefs in his burial chamber show that Tutankhamun's burial was attended by all the important dignitaries. The east wall shows a dozen of the top courtiers pulling the coffin on a sledge to the tomb,
including two who can be identified by their distinctive shaven heads as the chief ministers, Pentu and Usermont. The inscription over the figures actually identify the others as 'high officials of the palace'. It is inconceivable that as king's deputy, Horemheb would not have been among them. Even if he wasn't it seems most unlikely that a man of his resources would not have been able to exert pressure to get someone in the court to reveal the tomb's whereabouts.

All this is irrelevant, however, as the location of Tutankhamun's tomb was a matter of public knowledge. Contrary to popular belief, the tomb was not completely intact when Carter found it. It had been robbed twice in antiquity, soon after it had been sealed. The first robbery was for small pieces of gold and precious jewellery, most of which the robbers got away with except for a few gold rings found still wrapped in a rag and stuffed into a box in the Annex. After the priests had resealed the tomb, it was broken into again, this time to steal the precious oils and unguents which had been stored in large alabaster jars. For such robberies to have occurred and repairs made, implies a guarded tomb of the old mastaba variety, rather than one with a concealed entrance. Moreover, if it had been buried deep underground, as it was when Carter found it, the robbers would have had to burrow down and consequently have made their way into the tomb by way of a small opening. Only this would need to have been resealed, and there would have been no point in re-exposing the entire stairwell. However, as the whole doorway had been resealed after the robbery, it means that when the theft was discovered the entrance must have been exposed.

Incredibly, Horemheb not only refrained from desecrating Tutankhamun's tomb, he seems to have protected it. It was evidently on his orders that it was resealed for the second time.
When it was finally closed, the seals used were those of the royal necropolis which bore no royal names. These were exactly the same seals that were used in the tomb of Tuthmosis IV when Horemheb ordered it to be restored after
its
violation by robbers. An inscription in the tomb of Tuthmosis IV reveals that the necropolis scribe Djehutymose had assisted in the restoration, and his name is also found scribbled on a jar-stand in Tutankhamun's tomb.

All of this implies that there was something very special about Tutankhamun's tomb. Why did Horemheb make sure it remained intact when he had no love for Tutankhamun? The first thing that springs to mind whenever most people hear the name Tutankhamun is the so-called curse that surrounded the opening of his tomb. Is this the answer? Was Horemheb afraid to disturb the tomb because he believed it was cursed?

The story of the curse of Tutankhamun's tomb began with the strange circumstances surrounding the death of Carter's patron Lord Carnarvon. On 28 February 1922, shortly after the tomb was opened, Carnarvon departed for Aswan for a few days' rest. About the same time he was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. While shaving with his cut-throat razor, he inadvertently opened the bite which quickly became infected. A fever set in and, although he seemed to recover and two days later he was up and about and eager to revisit the tomb, he suffered a relapse and died. Soon after, the author Arthur Conan Doyle, who was fascinated by the supernatural, attributed Carnarvon's death to a curse left by Tutankhamun's priests to guard the tomb. The idea caught the imagination of the world's press. Reports included all manner of other preternatural events. Apparently, at the precise moment of Carnarvon's death the lights went out allover Cairo, while at the exact same time his dog back in England howled and dropped dead. It was also said
that on the day the tomb was opened Carter's pet canary was swallowed by a cobra – the very creature depicted on pharaoh's brow. Evidently, the expedition had ignored the warning inscribed over the entrance to the tomb: 'Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of the Pharaoh'. Other deaths were indeed to follow, and today they form an integral part of the curse legend.

No one who was associated with the tomb or the investigation of the mummy was apparently safe. One of the X-ray specialists invited to examine the mummy died of a stroke while on his way to Egypt. Carnarvon's younger brother, Aubrey Herbert, died suddenly the year after the tomb was opened, and Carter's right-hand men, Arthur Mace and Richard Bethell, both died under mysterious circumstances before the tomb was cleared. Others died, seemingly as a consequence of merely visiting the tomb. The American railroad magnate Jay Gould died of pneumonia as a result of a cold he caught there, and the French Egyptologist Georges Benedte died from a fall after being shown round the tomb. A more violent demise was in store for the Egyptian official Ali Kernel Fahmy Bey, whose wife decided to shoot him soon after he had viewed the discovery.

Was it fear of such a curse that evidently persuaded Horemheb to leave the tomb alone? It seems most unlikely, as the curse of Tutankhamun's tomb is a complete myth. Apart from the fact that many aspects of the story cannot be verified, such as the canary, the dog and lights going out, there never was any inscription over the door, or anywhere else in the tomb, which threatened death to those who disturbed the pharaoh. Where the story came from, God only knows! There were what the Egyptians believed to have been magic defences in place to keep the mummy safe. These Carter himself described:

Beside this traditional paraphernalia necessary to meet and vanquish the dark powers of the Nether World, there were magical figures placed in small recesses in the walls, facing north, south, east and west, covered with plaster, conforming with the ritual laid down in the
Book of the Dead
for the defence of the tomb and its owner. Associated with these magical figures are incantations to repel the enemy of Osiris [the deceased], in whatever form he may come. Magic, for once, seems to have prevailed. For of twentyseven monarchs of the Imperial Age of Egypt buried in this valley, who have suffered every type of depravation, Tutankhamun alone has lain unscathed.

Perhaps such a statement had been misconstrued. As for the mysterious deaths: although true, they did take place before the clearance of the tomb, for the painstaking operation actually took seven years. Consequently, the deaths had not all occurred at once as the now-familiar story relates. Bethell, for instance, did not die until 1929. In fact, only Lord Carnarvon's death is in any way synchronic. Indeed, most of the chief culprits got away scot-free: Lord Carnarvon's daughter, Lady Evelyn, one of the first to enter the tomb, lived for another fifty-eight years; Douglas Derry, the doctor who actually performed the autopsy on the mummy, lived for another forty-seven years; even Howard Carter – the man responsible for the entire thing – did not die until 1939, at the age of sixty-four.

We can tell from the strange condition and signs of hurried evacuation of Smenkhkare's tomb that the perpetrators of the desecration seemed to have feared some unseen menace in Tomb 55, but there is no such evidence in the case of Tutankhamun's tomb. The protective amulets in his tomb were no different from any tomb of the period, and such things never
stopped other pharaohs from plundering the tomb of a former rival. After all, they considered themselves gods and could do whatever they wanted. There must therefore have been something most unusual at stake to restrain Horemheb. The reason appears to be linked in some way with Tomb 55, as Horemheb went to peculiar lengths to protect both of them.

When Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb, its entrance was buried deep underground. Although the burial of many tombs occurred naturally over time, Tutankhamun's tomb had been deliberately buried a few years after its final sealing. Evidence for this was found in the tons of debris that Carter removed from the stairwell when he dug down to its entrance. Among the rubble were dozens of pieces of pottery and broken clay seals dating from the late eighteenth dynasty. For such remains to be present, the tomb must have been buried before the end of Horemheb's reign as he was the last eighteenth-dynasty king. Because the final sealing of the tomb seems to have occurred during Horemheb's reign, this means its burial must have occurred while he was pharaoh. Exactly the same seems to have happened to Tomb 55, as Ayrton also found contemporary artefacts in the rubble that covered its entrance.